Design and Development of Theranostic Nanomedicines - Nanotechnology for Biomedical Imaging and Diagnostics - page 419

15

Design anD Development of
theranostic nanomeDicines *

Jelena M. Janjic
Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Mylan School of Pharmacy, Duquesne
University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

Mingfeng Bai
Molecular Imaging Lab, Department of Radiology, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

15.1 theranostics for personalizeD nanomeDicine

Theranostics, or sometimes named “theragnostics,” emerged in the past two decades
as an “all-in-one” strategy that combines imaging and drug delivery. The number
of publications grew dramatically since 2000 to date, while the diversity of fields
involved in this area is very high. Figure 15.1 illustrates the emergence of this new
nanotechnology area with reports published in various fields such as chemical engi-
neering, biochemistry, and medicine. What this graph illustrates is the need for true
multidisciplinary effort in order to bring personalized nanomedicine to clinical
reality. Currently, we consider personalized medicine as an approach where the
patient disease status information is combined with information of their genetic
makeup relevant to the treatment. Fast metabolizers are given different doses for the
same medicine as compared to slow metabolizers, for example.
Theranostics promises to go a step further and allow for adjustments and person-
alization during the actual treatment. The promise of theranostics to personalize

*Jelena M. Janjic and Mingfeng Bai are contributed equally.